Big Ten Network tackles cable company

Blue Ridge refuses to add sports channel that carries Penn State football games.

August 19, 2010|By Scott Kraus, OF THE MORNING CALL

When the Big Ten Network kicked off in 2007, there were plenty of skeptics.

Some major cable networks — Comcast, RCN and Service Electric included — initially decided not to force the Division One sports programming on their basic cable customers, and declined to carry the channel.

Three years later, Blue Ridge Communications, which serves about 175,000 cable customers, including residents of Carbon, Schuylkill, Monroe and parts of Berks, Lehigh and Northampton counties, is the largest remaining holdout in the state. It doesn't carry the channel at all.

With college football season around the corner, Big Ten Network president Mark Silverman is putting on the pressure by touring Pennsylvania with Penn State athletic officials to turn up the heat on Blue Ridge and two other smaller networks, to convince them to add the channel.

"We are kind of stuck," Silverman said Thursday. "The reality is we can't make them carry the network."

The decision comes down to dollars.

The Big Ten wants to charge cable networks that carry their channel about $1 per month per customer, and they want the channel to be offered to all customers who receive expanded basic service in order to maximize their audience.

Blue Ridge would like to offer the channel as part of a digital package customers can purchase for an additional fee, said spokesman Joe Lorah.

Offering it to everyone would be too costly at a price of about $2 million, and result in higher rate increases for customers, many of whom who don't care about Big Ten sports.

"If they give us a good price and let us put it on our digital tier, we would probably do it," Lorah said.

There's been little recent progress in talks, Silverman said.

With more than 15,000 alumni of Big Ten school Penn State in their service area, Silverman said the cable network is doing customers a disservice by not offering the network, which televises a wide range of men's and women's sporting events that can't be seen elsewhere.

Lorah said the network has heard from less than one percent of its customers in recent weeks asking for the channel to be added. It wants to give customers maximum value.

"We hear nothing from when football season is over until the end of August," Lorah said.

Silverman said the network's agreement with industry behemoth Comcast, inked in 2008, allowed the cable company to offer the network to all expanded basic customers in the first year, and move it to the digital tier after that in areas where at least 60-70 percent of customers have digital cable.

While the Big Ten Network may appeal to a certain segment of viewers, Silverman said Blue Ridge carries plenty of niche programming — such as truTV and the Oxygen network — that also has limited appeal, on its expanded basic tier.

As a result, Penn State football fans in the Blue Ridge service area will miss as many as four to five Penn State football games per year that aren't carried on ABC or ESPN, Silverman said.

Lorah countered that only two games are guaranteed, and one of them is Youngstown State game.

The Big Ten Network's primary leverage, the threat that cable networks may lose customers who switch to another provider in order to get the Big Ten Network, is muted in Blue Ridge Cable territory because Verizon isn't offering its FiOS service there yet.

Satellite TV companies are hoping to make inroads.

DirecTV recently announced a special discount for customers of Blue Ridge Cable and Armstrong Cable in western Pennsylvania and Ohio, the two largest cable systems not carrying the network in the eight-state Big Ten territory.

Lorah said Blue Ridge hasn't lost a significant amount of customers to satellite provider because of its decision not to carry the Big Ten Network.